Moronic wrote:
I'm also interested in generating an antidote for the misinformation that still comes up quite prominently when you Google Thorn or Rohloff.
You're doing very well indeed, Moronic, and I say that as professional writer and popularizer since I was 13.
Remarkable really to have a major bicycle component that wears in over a very extended lifetime rather than wearing out.
My favorite bike mechanic, who owns several heavily-used Rohloff gearboxes, says, "A Shimano Nexus lies itself down to die just about the time a Rohloff is run in." Mean time between failures for the Nexus, according to Shimano's German distributors, is 50,000km. Mean time between failures for the Rohloff is -- unknown. The last time I looked, several years ago, there were known Rohloffs with 160K kilometers/100K miles on them. The number of breakages, even counting the ones that pointed to obvious abuse, were statistically insignificant, the number of total irrecoverable failures were nil. At that point I decided it was an answered question: my Rohloff will see me out. It would be a waste of money, even here in the wilds of West Cork, to buy a spare Rohloff wheel against the day my Rohloff wheel had to go to Germany.
By the way, if you haven't caught up to this fact yet: every few years Rohloff talks about a lighter, nimbler model, and then just quietly disappears it, clearly because they consider that the inevitably higher rate of breakages will damage their reputation for rock solid engineering. There's always enthusiasm for the lightweight model among the old road racers who grew up in a weight weenie cycling culture, but I won't buy one. I'm an old Porsche driver: I like the most solid German engineering. I reckon that for the quality of engineering and its longevity the Rohloff box is just the perfect weight.
Also, it might interest you to know that the Rohloff was designed as a German agricultural implement for mud plugging cyclists (Bernd Rohloff's own sport), without a thought for tourists. It was just happenstance that Utopia-velo, who don't march to anyone else's drummer and was looking for a stronger box than the Nexus, picked it up for touring bikes, and later the strong-minded parties at Thorn discovered it fitted their concept of their touring bikes well. The rest of the tourist niche manufacturers picked up the Rohloff because they saw two aspirational bike makers doing so, sometimes not quite understanding why Utopia and Thorn had chosen it.
